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Every suicide in which the deceased has been a victim of domestic violence should be investigated as a potential homicide, according to calls by campaigners who want see abusers held to account for the devastating affect of their actions.
The move is necessary because police and prosecutors are not doing enough to bring perpetrators to justice in cases of suicide after domestic abuse.
“In case after case, there is systemic and structural failure, especially within the criminal justice system, to scrutinise these deaths with the seriousness that they deserve,” Pragna Patel, co-director of the campaign group Project Resist said, at a landmark meeting in Westminster earlier this week.
The meeting, organised by Project Resist, which runs a “Suicide is Homicide” campaign to fight for change in the criminal justice system, brought together families who had lost loved ones to suicide after domestic abuse.
Sharon Holland lost her daughter Chloe Holland, 23, in March 2023. Before her death, Chloe had reported her former partner, Marc Masterton to police, giving a two-hour video interview as evidence against him.
After her death, Masterton was convicted of coercive and controlling behaviour and jailed for 41 months. He was later jailed for three years and seven months after a second woman came forward to report that she had been in a violent and abusive relationship with him.
After Chloe’s death, Holland decided to campaign for a new law to bring perpetrators to justice; however she then realised that laws were already in place, they just weren’t often being used to secure prosecutions.
“I decided it wasn’t a new law I needed as existing laws were already there, and after finding out how much my daughter had been failed previous to her taking her life by the police and many other agencies, they needed to do their job properly, and things needed to change,” she said.
“Over 47 families have found me and only four of us have had a conviction,” she added. “I was so shocked to see so many families who have been fighting the police and CPS [Crown Prosecution Service] for years and getting no justice for their child or sibling and didn’t have a voice and couldn’t speak out in case it affected investigations that weren’t possibly going anywhere.”
Saskia Lightburn-Ritchie’s daughter Hannah died on the in May 2017 at the age of 30, in what she described as “the final act of violence” in a campaign of abuse.
“[Hannah] was vibrant, she was loving,” she said. “She was full of promise, and she was an amazing, really loving mum to her two children, and she died by suicide after two years in a relationship where she was systematically destroyed by her partner,” she said.
“She was physically beaten, she was psychologically tortured, she was controlled and broken down piece by piece until she could not see a way forward. The man who did this to her walked free, because we call it suicide, we close the file and we move on.
“But I could not move on,” she said, “and I haven’t been able to move on. In truth, Hannah didn’t just die by suicide. She was killed. She was killed slowly and deliberately over a two year period, and when I went to the police, when I begged them to investigate what he had done to her, I was told that there was nothing that they could do.
“There was no investigation into her death. The domestic homicide review, which I had to fight for, took five years and changed nothing. A four day inquest found death by suicide, despite huge evidence over a very traumatic four day period of domestic abuse and failings by multiple services.”
Lightburn-Ritchie told the meeting that for eight years she has “been fighting a system that refuses to see what is right in front of it”.
She said the suicide is homicide campaign was critical “because when someone dies by suicide after they’ve endured domestic abuse, we have to investigate it for what it really is, which is homicide.
“We need to use the legislation we currently have effectively and it really isn’t happening at the moment, and we need to hold abusers accountable for driving their victims to death.
“We have the laws. We need the will, we need police to investigate properly. We need the Crown Prosecution Service to prosecute. We need judges to understand that words and control can kill just as much as hands and weapons.”
At a second meeting in the House of Commons, chaired by Labour MP Kirith Entwistle, and attended by safeguarding minister, Jess Phillips, the bereaved relatives again told their stories.
Alex Davies-Jones, parliamentary under-secretary of state for victims, told the meeting: “These deaths are often written off as if they were their decision, they chose to do this, when, in truth, these were the culmination of actually, somebody else’s violence, and these aren’t isolated stories.”
“Our law is broken, we know that,” she said. “Particularly around homicide, around murder or manslaughter, it is piecemeal. It’s not written in statute anyway, it has been developed with common law practices for centuries, and it is no longer fit for purpose, quite frankly, it’s the world that we currently live in.
“I’m not going to pretend that it’s going to be easy to fix. It is incredibly complex and difficult, especially when you look at the issue of homicide, but we recognise that it needs to be looked at.”
A CPS spokesperson said: “Domestic abuse is a heinous crime and our prosecutors are actively advised to consider murder and manslaughter charges in suicide cases where there is a known context of domestic abuse or other controlling or coercive behaviour.
“We have previously charged a number of defendants for causing the death of a partner they abused, including in proceedings which are currently active.
“We are also working with police and other stakeholders to ensure these kinds of offences are well-understood – so that we can bring perpetrators to justice for the full extent of their crimes.”
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In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email [email protected] or [email protected]. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
